Review: Why the World is Full of Useless Things

In Alan Moore's From Hell (a graphic novel about Jack the Ripper) there is a chilling sequence where the Ripper hallucinates after the murder of Mary Kelly. He is transported to the present day where he is amazed by the wonders that science and technology has given us, but even more amazed by our own responses to living in a time of miracles. He says

Where comes this dullness in your eyes? How has your century numbed you so? Shall man be given marvels only when he is beyond all wonder?

The same idea is expressed in Why the World is Full of Useless Things by Steve McKevitt, but his book is much funnier than Moore's. The premise of the book is that McKevitt wonders why the 21st century has not delivered the personal jet-packs, affordable space travel and clones of Raquel Welch that he looked forwards to when he was 10. Instead we have QVC, ready meals, Jade Goody and reality TV.

It's a funny book, it's an easy read, but it's not one of those quirky but ultimately pointless stocking fillers you sometimes get (they would be a good example of the sort of useless stuff McKevitt writes about). He really tries to analyse why our world is full of this tat. You'll have to read the book yourself to find out his answer. It's subtle and not easily amenable to summing-up as a neat one-liner. But you'll get a clue if I tell you that the book is divided into four sections: Hubris (thinking we know more than we do and we're more talented than we really are), Ignorance (and why being ignorant makes you vulnerable to being sold useless things), Mind Control (in other words, marketing) and Everything Now! (our ever-shortening attention spans and demand for constant entertainment).

I found it thought-provoking. I've read plenty of books that repeat stuff I already knew about why we should combat consumerism - because it's leading to over consumption, climate change, peak oil, soil erosion and so on. But McKevitt says we should combat it because it's just no fun. As he says in his 300-word summary of the book:

The world is full of useless things because we've made it that way. It's not a bad world, but if only we demonstrated the tiniest amount of collective ambition it could be a whole lot better. The first step is to demand more from ourselves and refuse to settle for facsimile lifestyles that are available in magnolia, beige or vanilla.

By the way, he also includes a 300-word summary of the book created by Microsoft Word Auto-Summarizer. Reading that was one of the laugh-out-loud moments.

Review: Grow Vegetables

Dorling Kindersley very kindly sent me some books to review. I'm very glad to receive free books. I'll also review CDs, chocolate and wine if anyone wants to send me some. One of the books they sent me was Compost by Ken Thompson, which I reviewed in March. The other is Grow Vegetables by Alan Buckingham.

As you'd expect from a DK book, the photography is gorgeous and the design is attractive and easy-to-use. Throughout the book, the author has borne in mind the different situations people might want to grow vegetables, from an allotment or a large garden down to a small veg patch in an ornamental garden, a patio, balcony or windowsill. There is something for everyone here, although if all you have is a windowsill you may prefer to borrow the book from the library rather than pay £16.99 for it.

The book seems to be aimed at beginners. For example it includes some extremely basic stuff, such as what does a hoe look like and what is it used for. That's a good thing - we all had to learn at some point, whether at our granddad's knee or from a book at a more mature age. All the basic stuff is covered in the first couple of chapters, titled The Perfect Plot and Vegetable Grower's Know-How.

After that it gets down to business, with sections dedicated to Cabbages and Leaf Vegetables, Root and Stem Vegetables, Peas and Beans, Salads, Fruiting Vegetables, Cucumbers and Squashes, Perennial Vegetables and Herbs. I think that's a very sensible way of dividing them up, collecting together types of vegetables that are cultivated in similar ways. It's better than putting them in alphabetical order as so many books do. That way runner beans, climbing French beans and dwarf beans are all in different places. If you want to look up a particular vegetable by name, there is a comprehensive index in the back of the book.

Within the chapters, each vegetable has a photograph, a description and instructions of how to grow it, and a little chart showing the "season". This shows you when to sow, transplant, and harvest the veg, but it only splits it into spring, summer, autumn or winter, rather than telling you the month. I think I understand the reaosning - not everyone lives in the same growing zone. I know that Stonehead in Aberdeenshire has a shorter growing season that we do in North Cheshire, whereas Stuart and Gabrielle of Permaculture in Brittany have rather longer. But I feel that just stating the season rather than the month is so vague as to be pretty useless. Almost all the vegetables say "Sow in spring, transplant in summer, harvest in summer or autumn". Well, duh!

However all is made up for in the following chapter, Vegetable Year Planner, which gives a month-by-month rundown of what to do in the vegetable garden each month. The final chapter is the inevitable Vegetable Doctor. It's the scary one with all the pests and deficiencies and diseases that might strike, very sensibly left to the end so hopefully it won't put anybody off.

The bottom line? I don't think I'll be offering this book as a competition prize, I think I'll be hanging on to it. That's probably the best review I can give.

What's New in the Sustainable Blogosphere?

For the last two weeks I have been too busy to keep up with my emails and blogging, and now I'm catching up. Here's a few of the things that landed in my mailbox that I thought worth sharing with Bean Sprouts readers.

Earth Day

First of all, this coming Tuesday is Earth Day. Earth Day has been going since 1969, but the time is right for it to really take off. I'd love to see it become bigger than Christmas (which is a religious feast for Christians like me but tends to be just an excuse for an orgy of over-consumption and wastefulness for, well, for Christians like me and everyone else as well). Earth Day is for everyone who lives on Earth. You'd have to be living in a cave not to notice Christmas when it comes around. Earth Day should be the same. Every time you buy a calendar or a diary it should have Earth Day marked on it already. So do something. Spread the word. Send an e-card. Give gifts of LE light bulbs and organic wine. Invite friends around for a meal of local food, obviously. Blog about it. Spread the word.

Swaptree.com Donates to the Sierra Club

In honor of Earth Day this Tuesday, Swaptree.com, the website where you can trade the books, DVDs, CDs, and video games you have, for the ones you want, for free, will be donating $1 dollar for every trade made on Earth Day to The Sierra Club. Swaptree is like Ebay but cash-less. British readers of a certain age will remember Noel Edmonds' Multicoloured Swap Shop which used to be on TV on Saturday mornings. Young viewers would send requests to swap a Bay City Rollers scarf for an Action Man with eagle eyes and so on. Swaptree is much swankier - you type in the bar code of the book, CD, DVD or video game you have and the clever Swaptree software figures out 2-way, 3-way and even 4-way swaps that mean everyone gets the things they want. You don't pay Swaptree for the privilege. It doesn't cost you anything apart from postage, and Swaptree can calculate the shipping cost and print out a mailing label so you don't even have to go to the post office. You give and receive feedback so you can feel confident you won't be ripped off. There's a video tour so you can see how easy it is. But sadly it is only available in the United States at present. As soon as it comes to the UK I'll be the first to sign up.

Penguin Classics Partners with The Nature Conservancy

Staying with the topic of books, I have some news about one of my favourite publishing imprints, Penguin Classics. On April 1st, 2008, Penguin Classics began their support of The Nature Conservancy's ambitious reforestation plan to plant and restore one billion trees in Brazil's Atlantic Forest.

In bookstores everywhere, bookmarks (printed on recycled paper) featuring three of Penguin's favorite environmental classics, Rachel Carson's Under the Sea Wind, John Muir's The Mountains of California and Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature and Selected Essays, will encourage readers to visit The Nature Conservancy's website, donate a dollar and help plant a billion trees.

There's more information about this partnership here.

Downshifting Week

International Downshifting Week starts today. Yippee! Thanks to Rebecca from Sallygardens for the reminder. Last year it was just National Downshifting Week, so it's growing fast. Visit the website for ideas of how to take part, including:

• Book a half-day off work to spend entirely with someone you love, no DIY allowed


• Cook a meal from scratch, using locally sourced, seasonal ingredients, preferably organic


• Cut up a credit card

I'll have a think about what I'm going to do this year, and I'll let you know later in the week. Please leave a comment and tell me what you'll be doing for IDW.

Take Back the Filter

The indomitable Beth Terry from FakePlasticFish has started a new campaign to urge Clorox (the company that owns Brita in North America) to take responsibility for the millions of plastic Brita water filter cartridges that are disposed of each year. It's called Take Back The Filter and has its own homepage. Here in the UK we can recycle our Brita cartridges. The FAQ page of the Brita UK website says:

All components of the Brita cartridge are recyclable. Cartridges returned to Brita will be returned to our own recycling plant in Germany where the component parts are separated and processed for secondary use. For information on BRITA In-store recycling contact the BRITACare team on 0844 740 4800

And the recyclenow.com Top Tips at Home webpage says:

In line with growing consumer demand for greener living, BRITA has launched a new in store recycling scheme. Recycling bins are now situated in a range of high street stores such as Robert Dyas, Argos and Cargo. Other major retailer collection points will be following soon.

The BRITA branded bins will be located next to the existing water filter category in store. Customers can recycle any BRITA consumer product filter cartridge, including those for the new BRITA water filter taps.

So once again this is more relevant to US readers than to our home grown readers. But the Internet is an international medium and I'm glad to support Beth's campaign.

This Bill's Got No Balls

Here's one specifically for UK readers, though. 'This Bill's Got No Balls' - the new short film from I Count - follows three hilarious scenarios where the protagonist, Bill, confronts three eyewatering situations - on the football pitch, in the office and on the street - that clearly demonstrate that he's lacking a sensitive part of his anatomy. Click here to watch the film.

Viewers are encouraged to visit the I Count website, from where they can put pressure on their local MPs to vote for a Climate Change Bill with balls when the new law is voted on in the summer. The film can also be viewed on myspace and facebook so please feel free to forward it to your friends.

Mathew Horne - of BBC3's 'Gavin and Stacey' who provided the voice over for the film - said:

The Climate Change Bill needs balls if we're ever going to tackle climate change. I will be putting the squeeze on my MP to make sure we have a tough bill. You should too.

The Broke Vacationer

Sally Thompson of TravelHacker has written an article called The Broke Vacationer: 100 Ways to Get Free Stuff When Traveling. I like some of the frugal tips in this article, although I don't really want to encourage people to fly all over the world on their holidays. Have a look at the article and decide for yourself which of the tips fit your own ethical values and which you might prefer to pass.

Home Gardening Tips

Bill Stanley, author of Home Gardening Tips, got in touch to ask if he could add Bean Sprouts to his blogroll. Bill has been a home gardener for over 20 years and enjoys sharing his gardening tips with friends and family as well as the rest of the world. As well as tips on plants and gardening, Bill has recently added articles about saving the environment whilst gardening, buying flowers online and those slimy little buggers, snails. Just for the record, I'm always delighted when anyone adds Bean Sprouts to their blogroll, or links to Bean Sprouts in a blog article. You don't need to ask permission, but if you do I'll check your blog out and maybe write about it, just like this! So email me and say hi.

We Dig for Victory

Rob Burns has built a mini campaign site called We Dig for Victory. He has created a little sticker and his website says:

By using this sticker on my blog or site I'm digging for victory by...
1. Growing some of my food at home or at an allotment - however modest.
2. Eating locally and seasonally where I can and reducing food miles.
3. Buying from small, local shops where I can and supporting my local economy.

There's a bit more about the campaign on the page titled About This Site. Why not add the sticker to your own blog or website and spread the word?

Thats it, I'm all caught up with my emails now. I only wish the same were true of my laundry .

Compost Competition Winner

A couple of weeks ago I announced a competition to win a copy of the book Compost by Ken Thompson. Entrants had to identify what was unusual about the following short review of the book:

K. Thompson's book Compost shows you how to turn scraps and plant cuttings into compost. It shows that it's quick and not at all hard to do. It has lots of full colour photos. This book is good for compost virgins and compost-o-phobics.

I didn't count all the entrants but there were quite a few and most of them were wrong, so maybe the puzzle was a bit too hard. Sorry. On the other hand, five people got it right and lots of people seemed to enjoy trying, so maybe it was just hard enough after all.

The answer was that the review was a lipogram, a piece of writing which avoids a certain letter of the alphabet. You didn't have to use the word "lipogram" to be entered into the draw, but you had to spot that the review didn't use the letter E, the most common letter in the English language.

My beautiful 4-year-old goddaughter Rebecca picked the winner out of a (rather small) hat this morning. The winner was Ruth Turner of Edmonton. Congratulations, Ruth. A copy of Compost will be winging its way to you as soon as I can get to the post office.

Compost Competition

If you would like a chance to win a copy of Compost by Ken Thompson (reviewed here a couple of weeks ago), then here's your chance. All you have to do is identify what is unusual about the following short review of the book:

K. Thompson's book Compost shows you how to turn scraps and plant cuttings into compost. It shows that it's quick and not at all hard to do. It has lots of full colour photos. This book is good for compost virgins and compost-o-phobics.

If you can spot what is unusual about the review, email me with your answer and your postal address. Don't put your answer in the comments. The winner will be pulled from a hat next Monday. The competition is only open to residents of the British Isles because I'm too mean to pay international postage. And anyway, think of the air miles.

Review: Compost

The first thing that strikes you about Compost by Ken Thompson is the groovy cover. I mean literally groovy. It feels like it has been made out of corrugated card. It's striking and eye catching, which is exactly what you'd expect of a book by Dorling Kindersley.

When you open the book, your expectations are not disappointed. The photographs, the graphics, the typesetting, everything about this book is beautiful. It's even more of an achievement when you consider the subject matter: if you had to create a book about decomposing vegetables, worms, poo, bacteria and fungi, could you make it a feast for the eyes?

But what about the content? To be honest, I'm in two minds. DK books are always visually stunning, but sometimes they can be rather shallow when it comes to content. This book is a bit like that. Any page you flick open you will find a full-page photo on one side and a few lines of enormous text facing it. It took me about an hour to read it cover-to-cover. And although it did contain a few things I didn't know (apparently a human corpse decomposes to a skeleton in about three weeks), there wasn't much (and even that wasn't terribly useful. I hardly ever put human corpses on my compost heap).

But on the other hand, I've read books on compost that went into so much science and detail about aerobic and anaerobic, thermophilic and mesophilic, exact recipes for the perfect compost heap, how frequently to turn it, the correct moisture content and so on, that it would put any sensible person off the idea of composting altogether. And that's silly, because as Thompson quite rightly says:

Even if you do everything wrong, you will still make decent compost eventually.

(only he says it in 197pt text).

This matches my experience perfectly, and it also matches common sense. It makes me laugh when people say things like "You can't put avocado peel on the compost heap. You can't put orange peel or any citrus on it." Of course you can. Orange peel decomposes perfectly well. I've got a decomposing orange in my fruit bowl at this very minute (I really should chuck it on my compost heap). Otherwise we'd all be neck deep in perfectly preserved avocado and lemon peels that would have been accumulating since the evolution of avocado and citrus trees. Getting stuff to decompose isn't hard. Stopping it decomposing is hard, but making compost is not hard.

So I liked Thompson's sensible, relaxed attitude. There's a chapter where he describes the standard "recipe" for perfect compost. You know the one: collect together at least a cubic metre of equal amounts of "green" (soft, nitrogen-rich material such as veg peelings and grass clippings) and "brown" (dry, carbon rich material such as shredded paper and hedge prunings). Layer them in six-inch thick layers. Ensure there is just enough water. Turn once a week. And so on. Then Thompson rips into this recipe with satisfying ridicule and sarcasm. Where are you supposed to store all this green and brown material whilst you're waiting until you've collected enough? How do you stop it decomposing in the meantime? Keep it in the fridge? Forget that, just decide where you want your heap then bung compostable stuff on it as and when it becomes available. There's no need at all to follow a precise recipe. It's a compost heap, not a damn souffle.

If you've never made compost, you might like this book. Especially if you're scared of compost-making for some reason, perhaps because you've read one of those silly books with too much science and prescriptive instructions. Ken Thompson's books is guaranteed to remove the fear and assure you that compost-making is easy and worthwhile. If you're an experienced composter, you don't need this book. Actually, you don't need any book, because all you really need to know about compost is this: 1) Put organic stuff in a heap. 2) Wait. And that's all that Thompson says, but with better pictures.

The Self Sufficientish Bible

Dave and Andy Hamilton are good friends of Bean Sprouts, and maintain one of my favourite websites selfsufficientish.com. On Thursday April 3rd their first book will be published, The Self Sufficient-ish Bible.

They say:

It is full of practical advice not only on how to be more self sufficentish but also how to be more ethical and greener. We hope that it is one of those books that will look really tatty within weeks of owning it as it will be referred to so frequently.

You can pre-order it from Amazon.co.uk, from your local bookstore, or your local library (the ISBN numbers are # ISBN-10: 034095101X - # ISBN-13: 978-0340951019).

Congratulations, Dave and Andy. It looks really good, and I'm looking forward to reading it.

Recycle A Book

Friends of the Earth has started selling 2nd hand environmental books in its new Bargain Basement. Starting at just £1.99, there's all sorts, from wildlife and recycling, to organics and kids' books.

You can give your used books a new lease of life by donating them for Friends of the Earth to sell in the Bargain Basement using the Freepost address:

Friends of the Earth Shop
FREEPOST
56-58 Alma St
Luton
LU1 2YZ

It sounds great - cheap books about environmental topics, a way to declutter your shelves, the chance to spread environmental ideas to new people, and support the work of Friends of the Earth, all in one place. Brilliant.

Review: Food Not Lawns

They say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover. You shouldn't judge it by its title, either. I spent the first half of Heather Flores' Food Not Lawns feeling rather frustrated at the lack of direct advice about turning your lawn over to food production. Instead the book is a rambling diatribe expounding the author's position on a variety of environmental, social, and spiritual topics. By the time I got to the end of it, I felt it had some interesting ideas in it but it really needed a different title. If you want to turn your lawn into a veg plot this isn't the book for you. At least, it's not the only book you'll need.

The mismatch between the title and the content of the book is continued in the chapters. Chapter one is titled "Free Your Lawn". Sounds like it's about freeing your lawn, perhaps to grow food, doesn't it? Instead it mainly contains the author's biography. The titles of chapters and sections don't necessarily give you much clue what the section is about. The chapter titled "Ecological Design" is mainly about a sort of mandala she calls a "spiral design wheel" which has "look deep" at the centre, and opens out through layers with names such as "let autonomy reign" and ends up with "COSMOS - SOCIETY - WILDERNESS - SELF - CHAOS" etc. It was all too hippy-dippy even for me, and I have a high hippy-dippy tolerance cut-off. I laughed out loud when she described her admiration for John Jeavons' "How to Grow More Vegetables", another book I couldn't get away with because it was too rambling, vague and hippy-dippy.

I'm glad I read Food Not Lawns because it does contain some interesting ideas. My favourite bits of the book were nothing to do with veg growing, but were about getting involved in your local community through activities such as seed swaps. The section about remembering to include children was also great. I wish I'd read the book with a highlighter pen so I could have marked the bits I liked. If I ever want to find them again, it'd be like wading through treacle.

If you like mandalas, yoga and community theatre this might be the book for you. If you think digging a deep hole, standing in it, then getting a friend to bury your feet and legs and then water you whilst you;

...raise your arms to the sky and imagine your leaves and branches unfolding, expanding towards the heavens. Close your eyes and imagine blooming, setting seeds, wilting, and returning to the earth.

will help you become more attuned to the mystic cosmic wossname, then you might like this book. I didn't like it so much. I prefer The Vegetable and Herb Expert by Dr D.G.Hessayon

Review: Guerrilla Gardening

Good old Santa. He brought me a pile of books about gardening and ecology. Actually, I drove one of his "little helpers" to Liverpool, led him into my favourite radical bookshop, pointed him to the ecology shelves and said "Anything from that section". You see, receiving crap gifts is wasteful to the environment, and you know how I hate waste, so I prefer to leave nothing to chance.

The first book I read from the pile was "Guerrilla Gardening" by David Tracey. It's about how to garden on land that isn't yours. How to beautify those horrid patches of wasteland that attract litter and junkies and illegally-dumped household items. You might throw a seed grenade over a wall, you might tie containers filled with growing salad greens to a chain link fence, or drop a few runner bean seeds at the foot of every utility pole, or even break through the tarmac with a road drill and plant a tree.

I thought this would be a good book just from the title, but it turned out to be even better than I expected. Tracey really is focused on beautifying the neighbourhood and giving it back to the neighbours. He's not just out to "stick it to the Man". So there are sections on how to get permission from the landowner, and how to get support and maybe even funding from City Hall, as well as advice on when it is better to seek forgiveness than permission. There are ideas for long-term projects where a group of people plant a garden and tend it regularly, as well as "hit and run" projects like the seed grenade idea. I really loved the idea of cutting a slogan out of a bedsheet, then using the bedsheet as a stencil by spreading it over a lawn in front of e.g. some corporate offices, and sprinkling organic fertiliser over the gaps. Over time the grass should grow thicker and greener in those areas and spell out your message in an environmentally-friendly but hard-to erase way.

The book is written with a light touch, filled with witty jokes and short quotes. I often paused to read a little bit out to Ed or my dad because I thought they'd smile. Things like "Resistance is Fertile" (slogan on a protest placard), "Please sit on the grass" (sign on a guerrilla-planted lawn), and "Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks" (quote attributed to Ian Hamilton Finlay). But it's no coffee-table book, filled with sound-bites and devoid of content. It's a practical how-to book which tells you the best way to plant a tree as well as suggesting some helpful things to say if you get stopped by the police. But primarily it's an inspiring book. I'm very keen to give some of these ideas a try, and I've signed up with Guerrilla Gardening.org to try to make contact with like-minded people in my area.

Top Ten Inspiring Books about Self Sufficiency

1. John Seymour's The New Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency. The self-sufficiency bible, stuffed with practical advice and instructions you can use as well as inspiring images and texts that make me yearn for 5 acres of my own.

2. Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie. As a child I watched the TV show that was loosely based upon it, and even then I wanted to be Laura and have her life.

3. Linda Cockburn's Living The Good Life is the true account of an Australian family's year without spending - they gained their electricity from solar panels, their water from rainfall catchment (during a year of severe drought), and their food from the garden and a rather cranky goat. It's an easy and engaging read, and inspiring, too.

4. The Reader's Digest's Food From Your Garden. Now out of print, I've had this book for years. I used to make the recipes from it, but mostly I looked at the drawings of vegetable plots, chicken houses, beehives, and wish I could have all those things. And now I do.

5. Chas Griffin's Scenes From A Smallholding. This is Chas's account of his family's adventures buying a smallholding in Wales and trying to live off the land. Most chapters are laugh-out loud funny, and a few are laugh-till-you-cry funny. Buy it even if you have no interest in self-sufficiency at all. Just buy it because it's so good.

6. Louisa May Alcott's Little Women isn't about growing veg or milking cows, but it has always inspired me. Although she describes clearly the hardship her family experienced, she also tells of the closeness between her sisters and mother, their creative and enthusiastic solutions to their deprivation, and the great love that suffuses the book.

7. Jan McHarry's Reuse, Repair, Recycle always fills me with ideas about how to get the most of out my possessions. "Thrift" is often associated with deprivation, but in fact the opposite is true. If you are thrifty you can get twice as much stuff for half as much money. This book shows you how.

8. Johanna Spyri's Heidi is another childhood favourite that sowed a seed in me. I found the descriptions of Heidi's life in the mountains with Alm-Grandfather and Peter the goat-herd much more apealling than her time in a fine house in the city of Frankfurt. Did I love these children's books I've mentioned because even at that age I already yearned for a simple life? Or do I yearn for a simple life because I loved these books when I was young? Who knows.

9. Craft books. Any and all craft books. My mum had a few of these when I was young, and I used to love looking at them and wishing for the toys and clothes and other things in the photos. I never got the same feeling from mum's home shopping catalogues.

10. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. No, just kidding.

Review: The River Cottage Family Cookbook

Yesterday I mentioned that my homemade sourdough starter is made with instructions from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Fizz Carr's The River Cottage Family Cookbook. There's only one thing I don't like about this book - the title. It sounds like a kids' cookbook - you might assume it has lots of recipes for pink cakes and pizza with the toppings arranged to look like faces. If you don't have kids, you'd probably never think of buying this book. Big mistake.

If they'd asked my advice, I would have advised Hugh and Fizz to name the book "The Campaigning Real Food Book For People Who Want To Learn What Food Is For And How To Work It". OK, maybe "The Family Cookbook" is snappier but my title is far more accurate.

To show what I mean, these are the chapters of the book:

• Flour
• Milk
• Eggs
• Fruit
• Vegetables
• Fish and Shellfish
• Meat
• Store Cupboard
• Sugar and Honey
• Chocolate

Each chapter starts with a discussion about what the ingredient is, where it comes from, what does it do. The authors want you to understand these ingredients, to grok them, because that's by far the easiest and most direct way to make you a better cook.

There are recipes, too, and they're great recipes. The emphasis is on family-friendly British home-cooked food, often with a twist. It's not trendy restaurant or dinner party food. But don't get the idea it's all been-there-done-that. I loved the sweet redcurrant and chili jam - it's the best accompaniment to cold meats ever. The creamy Brussels sprout gratin lives up to the promise in the text:

Some people think they don't like Brussels sprouts. This recipe should change their minds.

Green peas with roasted red peppers and chorizo was another eye-opener. But it's true that most of the recipes are for workhorse dishes - rice pudding, scones, bread, burgers, fish pie, roast chicken. Maybe you already have your own recipes for these things, or maybe you tend to buy them ready-made from the supermarket. The Family Cookbook would be a great book to give to a student or a young person leaving home for the first time. And it would also be valuable to a non-cooker who wants to learn how to cook the food they like to eat, with delicious no-fail recipes.

But my favourite thing about this book is the projects. These are a bit different from recipes. Some of them take several days. Some of them involve making an ingredient from scratch, rather than making a finished dish. All of them are fun and very educational. The sourdough bread I'm making at the moment is a project from The Family Cookbook. The butter we made a few months ago was another. I keep meaning to get around to the "make your own bacon" project. I know Steph has tried the "make your own sea salt" project, although when she realised she had collected the seawater close to a sewage outfall, she binned the results.

I give this book five stars out of five. I have bought it for other people, and I have talked other people into buying it for themselves. I use it as a reference book as often as I use it as a recipe book. If I was forced to whittle my recipe book collection down to just five books, this would be one of them.

A Rare Month for Boys

I collect first lines of books. It's not a physical collection you understand; I don't rip them out and keep them somewhere. But I can tell you my favourite opening lines of books. My favourite of all is the first line of The Crow Road by Iain Banks:

It was the day my grandmother exploded.

How cool is that? How could you not read on?

Daphne DuMaurier's Rebecca also starts very well:

Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again.

I like the rest of those books as well, not just their first lines, and have re-read them many times. Sometimes though a book fails to meet the promise of its first line. For example, I think Dickens' famous A Tale of Two Cities has a fantastic first line:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

and a wonderful last line:

It is a far, far better thing that I do...

but none of the lines in between are nearly as good. You may think me a philistine, but that's my opinion.

At the moment I am re-reading Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, as I do once a year without fail. Its opening line is:

First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.

Which I think is a seriously yummy first line. No surprise, really, Ray Bradbury can truly write. Some science fiction authors rely on inventive story lines (few rely on in-depth characterisation) but Bradbury can write. In Something Wicked he has a Jack Kerouac-beat-thing going, but tamed and set to a definite purpose. His purpose is to explore the nature of age and aging, of youth and growing up and old age. It's a coming of age novel in which the young heroes come to terms with change, and so does the old hero. It's hard to say which of them finds the process more difficult. There's also a seriously creepy evil carnival, a humble town library which becomes increasingly important as the novel progresses, and provides some of the best protection and ammunition against the bad guys (Buffy the Vampire Slayer owes this book a major debt), a scary train, a terrifying hot-air balloon. It also has without a doubt the best chapter of any book ever. I reproduce it here in its entirety:

I hope I'm whetting your appetite. If you haven't read this book you really should.

And you should read it now, in October, when the leaves are falling and the nights close in early and it's not quite cold enough for gloves and hats but cold enough to make your bare fingers tingle and ears ache. And if there's a carnival that visits your area around this time of year, so much the better.

Food For Free Review

I really enjoyed reading Richard Mabey's Food For Free whilst curled up in my favourite armchair. It is organised season-by-season so you can see what is potentially available at any time of year. I flicked straight to the "autumn" section to see what is available now, although some things are available for more than one season - dandelions, for example, and some kinds of mushrooms. Other plants offer different things at different times of year. Elder trees, for example, are listed under Spring, because the flowers can be picked then, but not under Summer when the berries ripen.

There are lots of full colour photos, but many of them are not large enough or clear enough to allow you to identify the plant (or fungus etc.) if you are not already familiar with it. It should show you clear illustrations of the leaves, the flowers and the fruit. I don't think it would be a very practical field guide, but I don't think it is trying to be - it is too large a book anyway. So you'll still need a fungus field guide, a tree guide and a wildflower/plant field guide to figure out exactly what to pick.

Food for Free contains some recipes, but it's not really a cookery book either. For one thing, I wouldn't want to splash ingredients or scribble recipe adjustments on its lovely pages (I tend to abuse my recipe books somewhat) and there is no separate recipe index. It doesn't seem to want to open flat either, an essential quality in a cookbook if you ask me.

I sound like I'm coming down quite hard on it, but I don't mean to. The book has many great features. For example, it is very extensive, covering not only the widespread and bountiful forage such as dandelion leaves and blackberries, but also rare things such as truffles and early purple orchids.

I notice that there is a Collins Gem version. I wonder how it differs from the large lavish paperback version I've got? Because I think what's really needed is 3 different books - a field guide to edible wild plants and fungus, a cookbook for them, and an armchair book. This is the armchair version. Now where are the other two?

New Books

I got two books through the post yesterday. One was Richard Mabey's "Food For Free" which lots of people have been telling me I must get. Thanks to my sister, Steph, for sending me that one.

The other was a copy of the now out-of-print Marguerite Patten book "500 Recipes Home-Made Wines and Drinks". I remember mum had this, and I suspect it is the source of her ginger beer recipe, so I'm going to give it a try.

The book is delightfully 1970s, with tips on throwing the perfect cocktail party (apparently Campari is becoming increasingly popular), and suggestions for dinner parties (she recomends serving creme de menthe, Drambuie or cherry brandy with after-dinner coffee). But it also has recipes for home-made wines, cider, perry, beer and mead. It also has instructions for a variety of liqueurs (like sloe gin), cordials and fruit syrups, and mulled drinks. I don't really need the cocktail recipes - I have survived this long without being able to mix the perfect Singapore sling - but there is plenty more in here I'd like to try.

Friends of the Earth Competition

Friends of the Earth are running a competition to win £150 worth of books from their online bookshop. They have introduced a new feature where visitors can review the books, similar to Amazon's customer review system. Anyone who writes a review between now and the end of October will be entered into a prize draw.

There are more details on the FoE website. I notice they're selling Food for Free which some Bean Sprouts readers have recommended. I feel a book shopping spree coming on.

Review: Fruits of the Hedgerow

I picked up Charlotte Popescu's
"Fruits of the Hedgerow" in my local garden centre, which was kind of ironic. Our allotment harvest has been poor this year. The best harvest has been hedgerow forage.

The book covers 17 different British wild fruits, nuts and seeds. Each variety has a short description and then a plethora of recipes such as quince muffins, lemon and elderflower syllabub and hazelnut ice cream. I was particularly attracted by the recipes for rowanberries and haws, which grow profusely near me but which I've never gathered before because I didn't know how to use them.

There are no illustrations in the book, and this is a serious drawback. What does a medlar look like anyway? Even in black and white, a line drawing of the tree/bush, of the fruit and leaves, would have been invaluable. But this book assumes that you can already identify the fruits, you just need some recipes for them.

I'm looking forward to trying some of the recipes in this book, if I can tear myself away from just using them to make wine.

Piece of Cake

I set a competition on Thursday, asking "How can you cut an apple pie into eight pieces with three straight cuts?". The answer was:

Cut the pie in half with one vertical cut through the centre (that is, how you would normally cut a cake in two). Then cut it into four with a further vertical cut through the centre, at right angles to the first (again, all normal so far). Then stack two pieces on top of the other two, and make one further vertical cut through all four pieces, making eight pieces.

Some people offered a slightly different solution, cutting the pie horizontally after cutting it in four. I don't think I'd be pleased to get a piece of apple pie with no crunchy piecrust on top. But I didn't specify "eight equally appetizing pieces" so I accepted this solution.

There were seven correct answers in all, and the winner (pulled out of a hat this morning by Eleanor) was Matt Shacklady of St. Helens. Congratulations, Matt. I gave the books to your mum and sister as as I passed through St Helens today. They seemed really nice. Say "hi" to them for me.

Win Cider Making Books

As it happens, I had just bought a copy of "Real Cidermaking on a Small Scale" for myself when another arrived with my new crusher and press. What is more, both new bits of equipment came with a booklet entitled "Basic Cider & Juice Making" by Alex Hill. If you'd like to win the book and the booklet, email me your answer to the following riddle:

How can you cut an apple pie into eight pieces with three straight cuts?

UK residents only please (think of the carbon released in airmail!). Don't forget to send your name and postal address along with your answer.

Review: Real Cidermaking on a Small Scale

Michael Pooley and John Lomax's Real Cider Making on a Small Scale came with my apple crusher and cider press. I have read the book, but have not yet tried the all techniques described. I have followed the directions for extracting apple juice, but I'm still collecting enough to make a batch of cider. Perhaps in the future I will write another review "Real Cider Making - One Year On" and will be able to tell you whether it really does do exactly what it says on the tin.

At a glance I can see that it's my kind of book. It's not one of your coffee-table books with glossy full-page photos and barely any text. It's black and white only, with hand-drawn diagrams showing you what to do, and grainy photos of people with beards and hand-knitted jumpers making cider out-of-doors. The text is detailed, with practical instructions of what to do and explanations of why. The science is also explained, from choosing the right mixture of apples to the biochemical process of what yeasts are and what they do, and what other bugs can do if they get into your brew, and so on.

The book includes a plan for building your own cider press. Alternatively you can buy one, for example from Vigo, or if you join your local homebrewing association you may be able to borrow one, or perhaps join in a communal cider-making day. There are also details on making and storing apple juice, making cider vinegar, and making perry (which is the same as cider but made with pears instead of apples).

It's a good book, and as soon as I had finished it I felt eager to start gathering apples and making cider myself. If you want to follow my experiments, watch this space.